Washington D.C., a Corporate Subsidiary

When the Senate rejected closing loopholes in background checks for gun purchases earlier this year, they definitely went against the will of the people. After all, a CBS News/New York Times poll found that 92% of voters supported the expansion. Yet the Senate, in a not-even-close 54-46 vote, rejected the bill, preferring instead the soft-on-crime status quo. With public support for the bill so nearly universal, why would the Senate side with criminals and reject what is a very common sense measure?

The answer to that is simple. The National Rifle Association owns a lot of senators. And let's not pretend -- as the NRA themselves do -- that the gun lobby organization is nonpartisan. The NRA owns the GOP. Of the fifty-three Democratic senators serving at the time, forty-nine received no funding from the NRA. Only seven Republicans could say the same. And you have to assume that some of those seven aren't funded because they're shoe-ins. Why waste money on a candidate who's in no danger of losing? Just throw up a national ad statewide and call it a day. The senate went soft on crime because the Republican Party did. And the Republican Party made sure criminals and terrorists could still get their weapons through the gun show loophole because the NRA demanded it.

And so we now have a status quo embraced by Senate Republicans, but rejected by 92% of Americans. Clearly, something is broken here. But there's a fix and it's steadily gaining ground.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Mitt's Red State Freeloaders

Apparently, Mitt Romney really wants to have this conversation:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.

Yes, let's talk about all those red state freeloaders. Mitt's wrong about one thing; the majority of non-income taxpayers are red staters, as the map above demonstrates. So let's talk about what a tremendous failure Republican economic policies are. Let's have that conversation.

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Since When do Republicans Get to Complain About Lying?

It's ugly. It's dishonest. It's quintessentially Republican. So why do conservatives hate it? Because they're on the receiving end of their own brand of politics for a change.

Las Vegas Review-Journal:

Sen. Harry Reid caused a stir this week when he told an interviewer that Mitt Romney hasn't released more of his tax returns because "he didn't pay taxes for 10 years." On Wednesday, Reid doubled down on the charge.

In an interview published Tuesday, Reid said an investor in Bain Capital, the former private equity firm of the Republican presidential candidate, told him in a phone call that Romney had paid zero taxes.

"Now, do I know that that's true? Well, I'm not certain," Reid told the Huffington Post, declining to identify his source. "But obviously he can't release those tax returns. How would it look?"

Whether this is true or not is a matter for debate and the pedigree of the claim ("this one guy told me this one thing this one time") strongly suggests it's not all that true. This all has the strong scent of horsecrap (and not Olympic horse dancer Rafalca's horsecrap, which I'm assured smells like roses) -- which means it also smells a lot like a Republican talking point.

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There's a Reason Why "Compromise" and "Reasonable" are Two Different Words

It's an argument that I bring up often on this blog; that compromise for the sake of compromise is not a good thing, but a bad thing. Especially when that compromise is between two positions at opposites end of a spectrum. If your house has termites, you might call an exterminator. Or you could listen to your crazy Uncle Stan and burn it down. Only burning half your house down does not qualify as a reasonable compromise -- no matter how insistent Stan's arguments are that it's the only solution. A bad idea is a bad idea. Infusing it with a portion of good idea doesn't improve it, it only ruins the good idea. Some compromises should never be made.

In politics, compromises also suffer from a misperception of the center position. There's the Washington middle and the American middle. The Washington middle -- being a town inhabited by a larger than normal proportion of lunatics -- is almost never where the American middle stands. These days, it's far, far to the right. Where Uncle Stan's idea is to burn the house down, the Republican solution would be to burn the house to the ground, then salt the Earth so that nothing ever grows there again. The "compromise" in Washington would be to embrace Uncle Stan's lunacy wholeheartedly.

Of course, I'm just some guy with a blog. No one's going to listen to me, no matter how solid my arguments are. So maybe if someone like Robert Reich were to make the same damned argument...

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Raising Taxes on the Poor to Float the Rich

If there's one thing that can be said about Republicans, it's that they love to cut taxes. Cut, cut, cut. Love, love, love. After all, it's your money, right? You worked for it and along comes Uncle Sam, who snatches it out of your pocket and gives it to some lazy slob with a sob story.

"Oh, boo-hoo-hoo!" said slob whines. "My bank almost went under because I was giving loans to people without jobs or income!" Get a real job, welfare queen!

Except, that's not the way the argument usually works, is it? Still, the economy crashed because moron bankers and Wall Street types were making seriously dimwitted decisions in a get-rich(er)-quick scheme, mixing in toxic assets with good investments, shaking the whole brew up, and serving it to everyone -- so, of course, those moron bankers and Wall Street types are the victims in all this. Really, are we to punish those who, through no fault of their own, were born brainless and greedy? I think not. No, we have to punish the people we always punish -- the poor, for the crime of not being rich.

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GOP Deficit Dishonesty

The deficit, the deficit, the deficit! By all accounts, the Republican Party is about to get tough on deficits. They're going to force Washington to get real and live within its means. If Republicans have their way, wasteful deficit spending will become a thing of the past.

There's only one problem with this widely accepted narrative -- it's not even remotely true. A couple of stories yesterday paint a picture of a party making a big show of deficit hawkery, while returning to their traditional borrow-and-spend ways. The GOP talked a lot about deficits, because they realized deficit panic could get them elected, but they aren't serious about the issue. They love deficit spending the way an alcoholic loves happy hour and they have no interest in giving it up.

Exhibit A is a gimmicky new house rule called "cutgo." Where Democrats used a rule called "pay as you go" or "paygo," which required all but emergency spending to be paid for somehow, Republicans are requiring that all new spending be offset by cuts. Or at least, that's what they'd like you to believe. But it isn't true at all.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

American Aristocrats

Maybe it's geography, but I often find Madison-based John Nichols and myself thinking along the same lines. While conservatives call the estate tax a "death tax," Nichols comes up with a much more accurate term for it -- the aristocracy tax (the link is mine):

The estate tax agreement is a giveaway to millionaires. Indeed, as the group United for a Fair Economy notes, "The deal (Obama accepted) would make the estate tax even weaker than it was under President Bush, and the weakest it has been in seven decades."

"Originally," the group OMB Watch notes, "President Obama had been calling for extending 2009 estate tax levels as a compromise on the issue. An extension of the 2009 estate tax would exempt the first $3.5 million ($7 million for couples) of an estate's value and tax any amount above that at a rate of 45 percent. This proposal was more than generous to the wealthy of this nation, as it would affect less than 1 percent of estates each year."

CONTINUE TO POST>>

The Republican Plan to Increase the Deficit

The big story so far today is House Democrats' refusal yesterday to take up President Obama's tax deal with Republicans. While this is undoubtedly a big story, it's not the only one and may not even be the biggest story coming out of Washington. It may come as a shock to some in the media, but there are two parties in Washington. While Democrats are refusing to accept what they believe is a bad deal, the other party -- known as "Republicans" or "the GOP" -- are refusing to accept anything, holding fast to a promise to stop everything in Washington until congress agrees to borrow an insane amount of money to give the wealthiest 2% in America a tax break.

The GOP argument is that these tax breaks are good for the economy. Look around you; that argument is obviously untrue. Those tax breaks exist now and the economy sucks -- it's like swearing that grizzly bear repellent works, while you're being torn apart by grizzlies. But tax cuts are Republican's snake oil; good for what ails you, from inflation to deflation, from unemployment to labor shortages, perfect for bad economies and good economies. The reason is simple -- they don't like social programs like Social Security and Medicare, so they want starve government of revenue to make these programs unaffordable. If GOP opposition to having the very wealthy pay their fair share demonstrates one thing, it's that GOP hair-tearing over deficits is a false panic. They want deficits. If you doubt me, look at what they want to cut: not taxes, but -- at the moment -- vague and unspecified spending. When they're talking about "spending," they really mean social programs and aid to states, since they've made it clear that one of the biggest contributor to the debt -- our bloated military -- is off-limits for cuts.

No, Republicans aren't worried about deficits, they're worried about very specific spending. Other than that, they really don't give a crap about anything. Certainly not you or me -- unless you're in that top 2% who are the only people they represent. For example, let's say you were a worker at Ground Zero or a first responder to 9/11. You spent a lot of time breathing in toxic crap and now you're sick -- maybe even dying. The GOP doesn't give a crap about you.

And they proved it.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Wikileaks and Kiddie Porn Barbie -- If Something is Possible, You Should Be Afraid of It

Beware this Christmas! Your children could be at risk! If kindly old Grampa Jimmy gives little Suzie a certain Barbie doll, then kindly old Grampa Jimmy could possibly be a child molester! So sayeth the imaginative, paranoid minds at the FBI.

Associated Press:

The FBI has issued a "cybercrime alert" on a new Barbie doll that comes with a hidden video camera.

[...]

The FBI's Sacramento office issued a report last month with the warning on Mattel's Barbie Video Girl. The doll has a video camera lens built into its necklace that can record up to 30 minutes of footage to be downloaded on a computer.

FBI spokesman Steve Dupre says the alert was inadvertently sent to the media but only was meant to be given to law enforcement agencies advising them not to overlook the doll during any searches.

"Officials warn that it could possibly be used to produce child pornography," the report tells us, "but say they don't have any reported crimes." It could be used to create child pornography, but it hasn't been. That's probably a better record of kiddie porn non-production than any other camera in the world.

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A Democratic Filibuster?

We have a deal on extending Bush's big tax giveaway to the wealthy. We'll continue to borrow money to cover a tax break for those who don't need one for the next two years, because it's so damned much better reach an unwise compromise than it is to fight for the right thing. Now Republicans will be allowed to continue to expand the deficit -- while blaming Obama and Democrats for growing deficits. It's frustrating that no one in the White House seems to see that coming.

Let's be clear; compromise for the sake of compromise is pointless. On any economic issue, one group will be right and one group will be wrong -- or, at least, more right and more wrong. Compromise insures that bad ideas from the cult of the wrong find their way into the final product. As a result, the "solution" is no solution at all. It's just not completely wrong. When you meet someone who's crazy halfway, the result is halfway crazy.

What do Democrats get out of this? More than we expected, frankly. We get an extension of unemployment benefits and we get payroll tax cuts -- the latter seems to have come out of the blue and will help the lowest income workers. If you don't get paid enough to have taxable income, you'll still get a tax break. There's an obvious Keynesian effect from this.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Republicans Agree to Only Wound the Hostage

We'll start off with a clip of John Kerry on Meet the Press this weekend, along with commentary from The Atlantic's James Fallows:

By John Kerry, no less. On Meet the Press today. (Clip may start with an embedded ad):

Note to Administration officials: make these points, and just keep making them. The Administration is offering a plan with tax cuts for everybody, and the Republicans are saying no -- to that, and to extended unemployment benefits during a time of record joblessness -- unless there is a hugely expensive extra tax cut for the very people who are least likely to spend the extra money they get.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Reconciled to Win

Big day tomorrow (or today, as you read this), so I'm writing this ahead of time. We're expecting the first major snowfall in the afternoon and I've got something else going that's going to take up most of my morning. This will probably be a little short, with three substantial blockquotes, so let's get right to it.

Talking Points Memo:

Using a wily procedural maneuver to tie Republican hands, House Democrats managed to pass, by a vote of 234-188, legislation that will allow the Bush tax cuts benefiting only the wealthiest Americans to expire.

Democrats were not united on the issue. Twenty voted with Republicans to kill the tax cut bill, as they hold out for extending additional cuts to wealthy Americans -- though 3 Republicans, including Reps. Ron Paul (TX) and Walter Jones (NC) voted for the tax cut extensions. However the outcome will (and was designed to) allow Democrats to draw distinctions between themselves and Republicans during the 2012 election cycle.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Have Republicans Fixed the Economy Yet?

"Have Republicans fixed the economy yet?" That's the question every Democrat should ask, every time a reporter sticks a microphone in their face. GOP leadership has made it clear that they plan to take no responsibility for any of their actions, so that responsibility will have to be forced on them. Throughout this lame duck congress and on into the 112th, Republicans should own the economy. After all, they're responsible for the state it's in now. Of course, Republicans will ask when Democrats will stop blaming Bush for everything, but the answer to that one is easy: when it stops being Bush's fault. After all, Republicans have never really stopped blaming FDR for a whole raft of problems -- some real, most imagined -- so I think dems can go on blaming Bush until the economy is back on it's feet, at least.

Which is a problem for Republicans, because they seem committed to keeping the economy on its knees.

That video actually understates the severity of the consequence of failing to extend unemployment benefits. Associated Press reports that financial analysts predict that "annual economic growth could fall by one half to nearly 1 percentage point," that "up to 1 million more people could lose their jobs," and that "hundreds of thousands would fall into poverty."

CONTINUE TO POST>>

R Stands for "Rich" and "Republican"

I've got a minor, yet essential, project to finish up, so this is probably going to be a short one, heavy on quotes. Some things just can't be put off, I guess... And then, some things can:

Huffington Post:

The House of Representatives on Thursday voted down a measure that would have reauthorized extended unemployment insurance for another three months, leaving no clear path forward to prevent the benefits from lapsing as scheduled on Nov. 30.

Without a reauthorization, the Labor Department estimates that two million long-term unemployed will prematurely stop receiving benefits before the end of the year.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

ExxonMobil's Ever-Shifting Strategy on Climate

I've always felt that one of the best examples of human foolishness was offered by international oil corporations. At the same time they were spending millions on a PR campaign to deny that global warming was even happening, they were drooling over all that open water that warming was creating in the oil- and gas-rich Arctic Circle. In 2007, ExxonMobil was exposed as having earlier launched a massive disinformation campaign; coincidentally the same year that McClatchy reported "the melt [had] reached record levels," as "the ice shrank to the second smallest area on record." Exxon knew this of course, because McClatchy also reported, "The arctic accounts for 13% of undiscovered oil, 30% of undiscovered natural gas, and 20% of undiscovered natural gas liquids," as the following graphic shows:



McClatchy also reported that the melt had resulted in an increase of arctic shipping serving the oil industry. It's impossible to believe that Exxon was out of that loop.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Keep Your Mitts Off My Slice of Pie

There are currently two schools of thought on reducing the deficit. The first is to actually reduce the deficit in a meaningful way, by letting Bush's tax giveaway to the top 2% expire. "You have to pay your bills; you can't keep borrowing from the rest of the world at that magnitude, year after year after year. So in light of all of those facts, I say we can't afford the Bush tax cuts," says former Reagan budget director David Stockman. The gap between the very rich and everyone else grew dramatically under George W. Bush, with all the benefit going to the very wealthy -- who, by the way,  are also the ones who ran the economy off the cliff with crazy get-richer-quick schemes.

"Two years after the crisis on Wall Street, it has been announced that bonuses this year will be $144 billion -- the highest in history," Stockman points out. "That's who's gonna get this tax cut on the top, you know, 2 percent of the population. They don't need a tax cut. They don't deserve it. And therefore, what we have to do is focus on Main Street."

Of course, the other school of thought on deficit reduction is to pretend to reduce the deficit with penny-pinching plans that punish everyone but the rich. But keep those tax cuts for the top earners, because to do anything else just wouldn't be fair. Taking from you to give to some Wall Street suit is apparently "fair." Raising the retirement age for Social Security, for example, screws you pretty bad, but it's not much of a hit to Mr. Moneybags here. But worse, it also hurts you more by making the job market more competitive. The principle of supply and demand dictates that this will drive wages down -- another loss for you, but a win for Moneybags who likes the cheap labor. In other words, you pay a penalty for being responsible and you pay it to the economic kamikaze pilots on Wall Street. I'm with Stockman here, they don't deserve the tax cuts and they don't deserve a bite out of your piece of the pie.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Taxation By Fees is Inherently Unfair

By now, you've probably heard about Tennessee homeowner Gene Cranick. The victim of government cost-containment gone mad, Cranick watched as his home burned down -- as did local firefighters.

About that assault on Fire Chief: The Messenger, a local newspaper, has the skinny:

Timothy A. Cranick, 44, a resident of Buddy Jones Road near South Fulton, was arrested and charged with felony aggravated assault, according to South Fulton Police Chief Andy Crocker.

Crocker said the assault stemmed from a fire that occurred earlier in the day and he identified Cranick as a family member of the person whose property burned.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Obama Shines, Jindal Flames Out

There wasn't much mystery preceding President Obama's address to a joint session of congress last night. Everyone knew it would be about economic stimulus, everyone knew it would involve cheerleading America, everyone knew it would be pretty damned good. Obama used the constitutional requirement that the president address congress on the state of the union "from time to time" to get both houses together in one place. Not specifically a state of the union address, it still filled the bill. The state of the union is not strong and Barack Obama -- as we've come to expect -- asked us all to roll up our sleeves and strengthen it.

Republicans -- still patting each other on the back for their near-universal opposition to Obama's stimulus -- were forced to face the undeniable fact that there was no victory here for them. The bill passed and the obstructionism of they were so proud of had cost them dearly. Polling shows that voters see the party as out of touch and just "not getting it." But, as I've pointed out before, in the House of Representatives at least, only the farthest right wing reps from the very reddest districts remain after two consecutive Democratic election cycles. They are the crazies, those for whom ideology borders on religious belief, those who are lost causes. Reality doesn't bother them, since it's not where they live. Being forced to face it the way they were must've been painful.

In this party made up of the surviving nuts, leadership has been hard to come by. They've elected party leadership, but no one pays any attention to them. "I don't even know the congressional leadership," says Utah's Republican Governor Jon Huntsman Jr. "I have not met them. I don't listen or read whatever it is they say because it is inconsequential -- completely."

Given this lack of leadership, the big celebrities in the GOP have been Sarah Palin, Joe the Plumber, and Rush Limbaugh. Seriously. They desperately needed someone serious to become the face of the party. Someone who wasn't a national joke or a divisive figure. Since only the crazies are left in Washington, they needed to go outside DC. They found Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.





He was just what they needed -- far enough right without seeming ridiculous and not an obvious fool. He's threatened to turn down a tiny sliver of the stimulus money for his state, while grandstanding on the threat. He's considering a presidential run the next time around and, unlike Sarah Palin, he speaks English. The GOP had found their guy. Gov. Bobby Jindal would deliver the Republican response to Obama's address. The new face of the Republican party was now something other than an unemployed plumber, an empty-headed former beauty queen, or a drug-addled blowhard.

It didn't go well. Jindal, already handicapped by limiting himself to the party line, was wooden and uncomfortable. He shot for a southern folksiness and wound up with the pacing and inflection of a Quick Draw McGraw. Even his walk to the camera at the Governor's Mansion in Baton Rouge was stiff, prompting one commentator on MSNBC to say "Oh God..." under his breath.

The governor started off well enough, pointing out the historical nature of the president's first address to a joint session of congress and giving a brief son-of-an-immigrant bio of himself, but things quickly went south. He claimed that Republicans had "better ideas," then went on to list off some of the things in the stimulus that he didn't like.

While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes $300 million to buy new cars for the government, $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a magnetic levitation line from Las Vegas to Disneyland, and $140 million for something called volcano monitoring.

Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.

We shouldn't be keeping an eye on volcanoes? And that "magnetic levitation line from Las Vegas to Disneyland?" Yeah, that's not in the stimulus. That "$300 million to buy new cars for the government" is $300 million to buy a more fuel-efficient fleet, saving the federal government money in the long run. As Republicans have been throughout this debate, Jindal makes stuff up to oppose. It makes you wonder how genuine their reasons for opposing it can possibly be.

Of those "better ideas," Jindal offered tax cuts, tax cuts, and tax cuts -- because using tax cuts to cure every ill has been working so well for us so far. He said that Republicans "stand for universal access to affordable health care coverage," but that's the first I've ever heard of it. They used to be all about health care savings accounts, where you put money aside to pay for health care -- because everyone's finding it just so easy to build up savings accounts these days. If the GOP has a plan for universal coverage, it might've been a good idea not to keep the details secret.

After they shut down the remote feed from Louisiana, even conservative commentators gave Jindal the thumbs down. "It came off as amateurish, and even the tempo in which he spoke was sing-songy," said Juan Williams on FOX News. "He was telling stories that seemed very simplistic and almost childish."

"In a moment when only the federal government is actually big enough to do stuff, to just ignore all that and just say ‘government is the problem, corruption, earmarks, wasteful spending,’ it’s just a form of nihilism," said conservative columnist David Brooks on PBS. "It’s just not where the country is, it’s not where the future of the country is."

"E-mails I’m getting are from disappointed conservatives," wrote Kathryn Jean Lopez for the National review's The Corner. "They wanted a full-throated response to Obama and expected and/or wanted more."

But these people should have less criticism for Jindal and more for the party in general. Jindal may not have done well, but he was only as good as the material he had to work with. Republicans really don't have anything but criticism to offer, so no one should be surprised that Gov. Jindal didn't have any solutions. If all you have is "Obama's wrong," it's hard to come up with some idea of what might be right.

The new face of the Republican party won't do much to change people's minds if the only thing it has to offer are the same tired old failures, instead of new ideas.

-Wisco

Republicans, Iraq, and Santa Claus

A trillion dollars is a terrible thing to waste.
Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., on the $888 billion economic stimulus package.

Wicker's statement represents the Republican view of the stimulus package. Sadly for him, he's typical of a GOP senator; how he feels about spending depends entirely on which party is doing it. Like most of the remaining Republicans in the Senate, Wicker voted with Bush every time a bill dealing with the occupation of Iraq came up.

$1,000,000,000,000 may be a terrible thing to waste, but $3,000,000,000,000 is just fine. That three trillion dollar price tag is what the invasion and occupation of Iraq will have cost us before we're done -- and that's the conservative figure. Talk about your shovel-ready projects -- we've been shoveling money down a hole in Iraq, while Republicans in Washington shoveled BS on the American people. The difference here is that all that money does nothing for the US, let alone Iraq. It's just a big money-pile we've lit on fire. If it's changed American and Iraqi lives at all, it's changed them for the worse.

On This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Jim DeMint debated the merits of the stimulus, with DeMint arguing in favor of tax cuts. Because eight years of tax cuts have been so good for the economy. To listen to DeMint, the stimulus is spending money to spend money.





"[D]on't say it's a stimulus when it's a government spending plan. And all of these things, the needs in our society, education, these are things we debate every year..." he said, "But this is the largest spending bill in history, and we're trying to call it a stimulus when it's just doing the things that... You wanted to do anyway." Frank decided that this would be a good time to resort to truth.

No tax cut builds a road. No tax cut puts a cop on the street. No tax cut educates a child...

The largest spending bill in history is going to turn out to be the war in Iraq. And one of the things, if we're going to talk about spending, I don't -- I have a problem when we leave out that extraordinarily expensive, damaging war in Iraq, which has caused much more harm than good, in my judgment.

And I don't understand why, from some of my conservative friends, building a road, building a school, helping somebody get health care, that's -- that's wasteful spending, but that war in Iraq, which is going to cost us over $1 trillion before we're through -- yes, I wish we hadn't have done that. We'd have been in a lot better shape fiscally.

"The problem is that we look at spending and say, 'Oh, don't spend on highways. Don't spend on health care. But let's build Cold War weapons to defeat the Soviet Union when we don't need them. Let's have hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars going to the military without a check,'" Franks said.

Of course, it's easy for Republicans in Washington to attack the stimulus to score cheap political points. But Republicans who have to deal with the real world don't have it so easy. Associated Press reports that "Most Republican governors have broken with their GOP colleagues in Congress and are pushing for passage of President Barack Obama's economic aid plan that would send billions to states for education, public works and health care," because state treasuries are "drained by the financial crisis." Many states have a balanced budget provision in their constitutions, which means that many states are facing an illegal shortfall. Here in Wisconsin we have such a provision and Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle is facing the possibility of "furloughing prisoners, knocking poor children off Medicaid rolls and slashing school aids."

But Republicans in Washington are protected from the real world. They aren't responsible for balancing budgets or paying for programs. This leaves them free to demagogue tax cuts. DeMint's plan to stimulate the economy includes making the Bush tax cuts permanent, cutting the corporate tax rate, cut the capital gains tax, and cutting spending. In other words, the same old Republican same old. If this actually worked, wouldn't we be just fine right now?

At the heart of all of this is a Republican attempt to buy votes with tax cuts. This has been a cornerstone Republican political theory since Reagan. "[A]s the primary political theoretician of the supply-side camp, I began arguing the 'Two Santa Claus Theory' in 1974," wrote Wall Street Journal associate editor Jude Wanniski in 1999. "If the Democrats are going to play Santa Claus by promoting more spending, the Republicans can never beat them by promoting less spending. They have to promise tax cuts in order to grow the economy -- not to 'starve the government of revenue,' which is Milton Friedman's rationale."

Basically, Democrats had leftover New Deal programs like Social Security and Medicare to run on. Infrastructure spending and aid to states. Republicans could never win if they were just the party of "no" -- which is basically what they are. Democrats gave, Republicans took away. The idea was that no one would vote for someone who promised to take something away from them. Republicans had to do their own giving, thereby buying votes in the same way they thought Democrats were.

So tax cuts became the new Republican give-away. Always cut taxes, no matter what. And, if you cut taxes enough, you'll "starve the beast" and force government to cut spending. We saw it with Bush -- tax cuts were the cure for every ill. If the economy was doing well, as it was when Bush came into office, then you needed tax cuts to keep the economy going. If the economy was bad, you needed tax cuts to get it back on its feet. There is no situation where a Republican won't call for tax cuts. It doesn't matter whether or not it helps, all that matters is buying votes and forcing government to cut spending.

Recent history shows us that Republican economic theory -- deregulate, spend insane amounts of revenue on the military, and cut taxes -- doesn't work. Yet here they are, pretending the last eight years never happened.

"The Republicans got what they wanted from Wanniski's work," writes Thom Hartmann. "They held power for thirty years, made themselves trillions of dollars, cut organized labor's representation in the workplace from around 25 percent when Reagan came into office to around 8 of the non-governmental workforce today, and left such a massive deficit that some misguided 'conservative' Democrats are again clamoring to shoot Santa with working-class tax hikes and entitlement program cuts."

The question for Republicans isn't "what's good for the country?" The question Republicans ask is "what's good for us?"

-Wisco

Slowing the Stimulus

There seems to be a little bump in the road to Barack Obama's economic stimulus package. Republicans, for reasons we'll get to shortly, are putting the brakes on the idea, under the flag of caution. It's a whole lot of money, they argue, and you can't just rush willy-nilly into this kind of thing. After having rushed willy-nilly into the invasion of Iraq and the massive bank bailout, it's tempting to give them the benefit of the doubt -- maybe they've learned their lesson. All this willy-nilly rushing often turns out bad.

"As of right now, Americans are left with more questions than answers about this unprecedented government spending, and I believe the taxpayers deserve to know a lot more about where it will be spent before we consider passing it," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said.

But these are Republicans and assuming cynicism in their motives isn't never a bad bet. Many see the concerns about the stimulus as being more about the future of the Republican party than about the future of the nation. Dean Baker -- who I'm really starting to like -- points out that the GOP is starting another round of historical revisionism. In what they claim is "a careful rereading of the history of the New Deal," Republicans claim that "President Roosevelt's policies actually lengthened the Great Depression." But it's not a rerun of a history they've completely made up that worries them, it's the history that actually happened. Specifically, after the depression.

[F]rom the standpoint of Republicans, the more ominous lesson of the New Deal policies is that it left the Democrats firmly in power for more than 20 years. The Republicans did not regain the White House until 1952, 20 years after President Roosevelt was first elected.

Imagine how terrifying the prospect of 20 years of Democratic presidencies must be for the current generation of Republican leaders. This would mean that they would not retake the White House until 2028, just 20 years before the Social Security trust fund is first projected to face a shortfall.

As Baker sees it, Republicans believe they have to burn the village to save it. Maybe this stimulus would save the economy, but Republican ideas are -- in their own minds -- the only moral way to think. Two decades of Democratic rule would be sacrificing American society to save the American economy. It's not about Republican economic ideas, but Republican societal ideas. They see twenty years of abortion and gay rights and evolution education and that crazy, hippy environmentalism stuff. The GOP, with an already shrinking demographic base, sees American society creating even fewer of those base dwellers.





So, given the options, the GOP will take a trainwreck of an economy over what they see as an unacceptably decadent populace, bought off by Democrats with government "socialism." Republican resistance to the stimulus package has nothing to do with fiscal caution.

Still, Obama sees this and throws the GOPers a bone in the form of corporate tax cuts. It would provide a $3,000 tax credit to companies that hire or retrain workers. The idea (or, more precisely, the pretense) is that if corporations get tax cuts if they hire more people, they'll hire more people. But this reasoning -- a cornerstone of Republican thought -- never made a damned bit of sense. People aren't in business to supply jobs, people are in business to make money. If you're going to make money by hiring more people, you're going to hire more people -- tax cut or no tax cut. If you're going to make more money laying people off, you're going to lay people off. In fact, it'd be good business to borrow money to hire people, assuming that your profits would be more than the interest. Not one business in America will hire more people just because they can afford to. That's just making busy-work to get a tax cut that won't cover the cost of the busy-work. It makes no sense at all.

We're going to wind up dealing with massive deficits for years to come and, as a result, we shouldn't be wasting time and losing tax revenue through ill-advised tax cuts. And it's there that Obama's meeting another speed bump from his own party. Top dems are complaining about the provision:

Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND): If I’m a business person, it’s unlikely if you give me a several-thousand-dollar credit that I’m going to hire people if I can’t sell the products they’re producing…That to me is just misdirected.

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA): I’m not that excited about it…The creation of a tax credit for hiring isn’t going to make up for the lack of goods being sold.

I think that Obama's worried about Republican resistance, so he's trying to buy them off with a nod to their idiotic trickle-down economics. But I also think that Kerry and Conrad know the vote count here. Democrats may not have a filibuster-proof Senate, but they're only going to be a vote short of it. In this political climate, it's almost impossible to believe that the Republicans are going to be able to maintain perfect party discipline -- someone's going to vote with the Democrats. If a filibuster fails, the stimulus is sure to pass. So, all things considered, I think it's safe to assume that the stimulus is sure to pass.

Republicans may want this bone, but I don't think they should get it. If they win this one, they'll use it as a toehold to spin the whole thing. This one sliver of Republican ideology will be spun into the sole reason for the success of the entire package. They're thinking of the twenty years in the wilderness and we shouldn't be dropping bread crumbs to help them find their way out.

-Wisco